Choosing a Lighting Technique

Checked with version: 5.1

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Difficulty: Beginner

Broadly speaking, lighting in Unity can be considered as either ‘realtime’ or ‘precomputed’ in some way and both techniques can be used in combination to create immersive scene lighting.

In this section we will give a brief overview of what opportunities the different techniques offer, their relative advantages and individual performance characteristics.

Realtime Lighting

By default, lights in Unity - directional, spot and point, are realtime. This means that they contribute direct light to the scene and update every frame. As lights and GameObjects are moved within the scene, lighting will be updated immediately. This can be observed in both the scene and game views.

The effect of realtime light alone. Note that shadows are completely black as there is no bounced light. Only surfaces falling within the cone of the Spotlight are affected.

Realtime lighting is the most basic way of lighting objects within the scene and is useful for illuminating characters or other movable geometry.

Unfortunately, the light rays from Unity’s realtime lights do not bounce when they are used by themselves. In order to create more realistic scenes using techniques such as global illumination we need to enable Unity’s precomputed lighting solutions.

Baked GI Lighting

When 'baking’ a ‘lightmap', the effects of light on static objects in the scene are calculated and the results are written to textures which are overlaid on top of scene geometry to create the effect of lighting.

Left: A simple lightmapped scene. Right: The lightmap texture generated by Unity. Note how both shadow and light information is captured.

These ‘lightmaps’ can include both the direct light which strikes a surface and also the ‘indirect’ light that bounces from other objects or surfaces within the scene. This lighting texture can be used together with surface information like color (albedo) and relief (normals) by the ‘Shader’ associated with an object’s material.

With baked lighting, these light textures (lightmaps) cannot change during gameplay and so are referred to as ‘static’. Realtime lights can be overlaid and used additively on top of a lightmapped scene but cannot interactively change the lightmaps themselves.

With this approach, we trade the ability to move our lights at gameplay for a potential increase in performance, suiting less powerful hardware such as mobile platforms.

Precomputed Realtime GI Lighting

Whilst traditional, static lightmaps are unable to react to changes in lighting conditions within the scene, Precomputed Realtime GI does offer us a technique for updating complex scene lighting interactively.

With this approach it is possible to create lit environments featuring rich global illumination with bounced light which responds, in realtime, to lighting changes. A good example of this would be a time of day system - where the position and color of the light source changes over time. With traditional baked lighting, this is not possible.

A simple example of time of day using Precomputed Realtime GI.

In order to deliver these effects at playable framerates, we need to shift some of the lengthy number-crunching from being a realtime process, to one which is ‘precomputed’.

Precomputing shifts the burden of calculating complex light behaviour from something that happens during gameplay, to something which can be calculated when time is no longer so critical. We refer to this as an ‘offline’ process.

So how does this work?

Most frequently it is indirect (bounced) light that we want to store in our lightmaps when trying to create realism in our scene lighting. Fortunately, this tends to be soft with few sharp, or 'high frequency’ changes in color. Unity’s Precomputed Realtime GI solution exploits these ‘diffuse’ characteristics of indirect light to our advantage.

Finer lighting details, such as crisp shadowing, are usually better generated with realtime lights rather than baking them into lightmaps. By assuming we don’t need to capture these intricate details we can greatly reduce the resolution of our global illumination solution.

By making this simplification during the precompute, we effectively reduce the number of calculations we need to make in order to update our GI lighting during gameplay. This is important if we were to change properties of our lights - such as color, rotation or intensity, or even make change to surfaces in the scene.

To speed up the precompute further Unity doesn’t directly work on lightmaps texels, but instead creates a low resolution approximation of the static geometry in the world, called ‘clusters’.

Left: With scene view set to ‘Albedo’ the texels generated by Unity’s Precomputed Realtime GI can clearly be seen. By default a texel in this view is roughly the size of a cluster.
Right: The scene as it appears in-game once the lighting has been calculated and the results converted to lightmap textures and applied.
Traditionally when calculating global illumination, we would ‘ray trace’ light rays as they bounce around the static scene. This is very processing intensive and therefore too demanding to be updated in realtime. Instead, Unity uses ray tracing to calculate the relationships between these surface clusters beforehand - during the 'Light Transport' stage of the precompute.

By simplifying the world into a network of relationships, we remove the need for expensive ray tracing during the performance-critical gameplay processes.

We have effectively created a simplified mathematical model of the world which can be fed different input during gameplay. This means we can make modifications to lights, or surface colors within the scene and quickly see the effects of GI in scene lighting update at interactive framerates. The resulting output from our lighting model can then be turned into lightmap textures for rendering on the GPU, blended with other lighting and surface maps, processed for effects and finally output to the screen.

Benefits and Costs

Although it is possible to simultaneously use Baked GI lighting and Precomputed Realtime GI, be wary that the performance cost of rendering both systems simultaneously is exactly the sum of them both. Not only do we have to store both sets of lightmaps in video memory, but we also pay the processing cost of decoding both in shaders.

The cases in which you may wish to choose one lighting method over another depend on the nature of your project and the performance capabilities of your intended hardware. For example, on mobile where video memory and processing power is more limited, it is likely that a Baked GI lighting approach would be more performant. On ‘standalone computers’ with dedicated graphics hardware, or recent games consoles, it is quite possible to use Precomputed Realtime GI or even to use both systems simultaneously.

The decision on which approach to take will have to be evaluated based on the nature of your particular project and desired target platform. Remember that when targeting a range of different hardware, that often it is the least performant which will determine which approach is needed.

Enabling Baked GI or Precomputed Realtime GI

By default, both Precomputed Realtime GI and Baked GI are enabled in Unity’s Lighting panel (Lighting>Scene). With both enabled, which technique is used can then be controlled by each light individually (Inspector>Light>Baking).

Using both Baked GI and Precomputed Realtime GI together in your scene can be detrimental to performance. A good practise is to ensure that only one system is used at a time, by disabling the other globally. This can be done by unchecking the box next to either Precomputed Realtime GI or Baked GI from Unity’s lighting panel (Lighting>Scene). Now only the checked option will be present in your scene, and any settings configured per-light will be overridden.

Per-Light Settings

The default baking mode for each light is ‘Realtime’. This means that the selected light(s) will still contribute direct light to your scene, with indirect light handled by Unity’s Precomputed Realtime GI system.

However, if the baking mode is set to ‘Baked’ then that light will contribute lighting solely to Unity’s Baked GI system. Both direct and indirect light from those lights selected will be ‘baked’ into lightmaps and cannot be changed during gameplay.

Point light with the per-light Baking mode set to ‘Realtime’.

Selecting the ‘Mixed’ baking mode, GameObjects marked as static will still include this light in their Baked GI lightmaps. However, unlike lights marked as ‘Baked’, Mixed lights will still contribute realtime, direct light to non-static GameObjects within your scene. This can be useful in cases where you are using lightmaps in your static environment, but you still want a character to use these same lights to cast realtime shadows onto lightmapped geometry.